Here is my father, the year he met my mother in Margate and Herne Bay.
Categories
Tag: England
Categories
Two Women From Manchester
As the elderly gray-haired gays tittle-tattle at Joe’s Coffee shop on Commercial Street, making snide comments about those they like and those they don’t… like so many teenage girls, bullying, name calling and whispering. The lesbians remain dignified and polite. They say good morning or make easy conversation. They comment on the weather or ones choice of croissant in such a way that improves the quality of the day.
Not all lesbian are like this of course but my experience here in Provincetown is irrefutable.
We chanced upon a lesbian memorial at Herring Cove a few nights ago, a memorial for a woman who died last October. There were photographs of her set around the fire on sticks. I sat with her wife of 30 years and she reminisced. She told me their story. I wondered how she would cope on her own.
“Oh, you get used to it.” She said.
I didn’t believe her. Dude sat on her lap. She loved Dude and Dude loved her. We ate her Red Velvet gluten free cup cake and sprayed ourselves with insect repellent.
Last night I stopped for a slice of pizza with Brent and Derek, my crime fighting buddies.
We’d had a long day, I was up at 5am. I’d spent an hour or so on the phone with lawyers. I spent time answering emails. I filled in forms and scanned them. I made time to have a pair of sandals made here:
Like most days I walked the dogs in the graveyard with Benoit. I walked the dogs on the beach. I walked the dogs to Joe’s coffee shop. I walked the dogs to the West End and back east again. Dude is still fat. The Little Dog is lithe and eager.
I found a beautiful dusky gray/mauve tamarisk at Captain Jack’s Wharf.
Brent and I poked our noses into John Derian’s home/shop. His little shop of curiosities. He sells French glass cloche and rattan and decoupage. Who buys decoupage? Everyone apparently.
I ordered the slice of Pizza and sat with Derek. It was delicious. As I was leaving, I heard a Northern English accent. Two elderly women from Manchester… eating the largest pizza I have ever seen. They looked embarrassed.
They said, “This is too big for us, d’you want some?”
I overcame my English reserve and sat with them and ate their pizza. They were retired PE teachers from Bolton. They had lived together the past 15 years. They had a small house and garden and took the bus into central Manchester which, they assured me, was very safe and had loads to do.
I wanted to know what they were doing with their retirement.
They said they went to concerts and the theatre and sat outside ‘weather permitting’ enjoying Manchester’s ‘cafe society’. They rode their bikes and looked after their cats. Mostly they travelled, this year they had been to The Galapagos and seen the giant tortoise and snorkel with penguins, they had taken a safari in Africa and showered out doors under the stars. They had visited a brother in Sydney and driven to Melbourne along the coast, like I had with that beautiful boy… all those years ago.
I found myself talking about getting older.
“Old people aren’t the same as when I was growing up.” I wondered. “Yes,” they said, “Not the same at all.”
“They retired and spent time just waiting to die.” I said. “Yes.” They nodded in unison.
I told them about my grandmother who was widowed when she was in her 50’s and at that very moment became an old lady. Cut her hair short, permed it and let it whiten. She died when she was 96. I didn’t cry. My mother did, she sobbed like I sobbed when the big dog was killed. She was inconsolable, as was I about my dog.
I thought a great deal about my grandmother, chatting with these dear old lesbians. I wondered how she could have lived so long feeling so miserable, stuck in one town, complaining about this and that… isolated from all her daughters (how can a mother hate her own daughters?) other than my mother. I remembered just how much she didn’t want to die. She was terrified. I wondered if my uncle Norman killed her. There was little love lost between them and he was with her at the end. She would have been too weak to fight.
We said our goodbyes and good nights. I’m sure I’ll bump into them again. I hope I do. I wish I was an old lady.
The light is beautiful here today. The sea is sparkling. I want for nothing. Happily looking over the Atlantic, the Cape swinging around me teaming with life. Lobsters, basking sharks, oysters, cod and herring. I had fish and chips for lunch yesterday.
Here are my finished sandals:
Categories
UKIP! What Do You Want?
Wow, this immigration thing is getting serious for you brits? I get that you’re feeling uncomfortable in your own country and many of you don’t seem to fully understand why you’re feeling so uncomfortable.
What do you people want? I can hear what you DON’T want. You don’t want foreign languages spoken on YOUR streets. You don’t want Eastern Europeans taking your jobs. You don’t want to do business with Europe. You don’t want to lose the Scots. Some of you don’t want gays to get married.
It seems like a lot of you are drowning in nostalgia, kidding yourselves that you can reclaim some beautiful ideal England. The bucolic lie we tell ourselves England once was: White faces, full employment, strict adherence to the class we were brought up in… Is that what you want? I’d genuinely like to know.
Tell me what you want. Tell me what this great british utopia looks like… once you have kicked out all the Romanians, the eastern Europeans, the muslims, the jews, the homosexuals… once you have purged your cities of indian, chinese and mexican restaurants… once your boarders are iron curtains with strictly regulated tourism… in and out of your country. Is that what you people want? I really have no idea when I hear UKIP and their supporters… what the end game is?
If British people bothered to learn and speak other languages (like the UKIP leader‘s wife learned English) they might feel happier taking advantage of the free movement of labour within the EU. But let’s face it, the basic brit is a retarded xenophobe who blames anyone but himself for his woes.
Oh, and here’s a picture of a foreigner with big tits to grab your attention.
Categories
Writing My Will
1.
Another wholly preventable wild-fire in the mountains.
If only, like the Mexicans, the residents of the Santa Monica Mountains could bear the idea of a yearly brush burn.
Then, every decade, they wouldn’t stand miserably by their pyre lamenting the loss of personal items on the early evening news.
2.
So. I’m writing my last will and testament. And, after much prayer/thought, I’ve decided to leave everything to my former school Monkton Wyld.
I am also discussing making a charitable donation to Monkton which is now a residential education center.
The Grade II listed neo-Gothic building is set amongst an idyllic eleven acres of lawns, gardens and meadows.
Designed by Richard Cromwell Carpenter, the rectory was built in 1848. It is in need of help. Tracery needs restoring, energy efficient windows need installed and a large bay window at the front of the house needs underpinning.
As a Centre for Sustainable Education, Monkton Wyld hosts a range of courses, conferences and gatherings for adults, families and children.
From bee-keeping to scything to yoga, Monkton’s programme promotes low-impact, earth-centred skills for changing modern life.
Meals are prepared in the house kitchen using fresh organic ingredients from the Court’s own Victorian walled garden, orchards and farm.
The Court is managed by a resident volunteer staff with the help of volunteers and overseen by a board of trustees.
They work to develop and promote a lifestyle based on mutual respect for each other and for the wider community and environment.
Sounds perfect doesn’t it?
I want my ashes scattered there.
Have you written a will? How many single people do? It is imperative.
I’ve been thinking for many years what to do with any money I might have when I die and this, I believe, is the best solution. Helping with the fabric of this building may secure its future for decades to come.
Categories
The Viper in Me
Meeting you once. That was enough. I don’t need any more chaos in my life. That’s what a moment with you was. Whoever you are. Was that your real name? Did I tell you my real name. Isn’t that the point?
A community of liars, reinventing themselves for a wet, dark moment under the covers.
That’s what they don’t want you to know. So many lies they tell. They want you to believe we just are like you. We are just like you behind the elegant front door.
The bronze gargoyle.
No women to temper our worst excesses.
Dawn.
Again.
Those yellow, silk satin curtains were bought for me by Jean Paul Gaultier on Nothing Hill the day after the IRA blew up the City of London. They are pretty threadbare at the edges.
I don’t care.
He picked me up at the Market Tavern in Vauxhall. He sent the bar man over with a pint. Paid for. Caught my attention. I had no intention of kissing him. Making love to him. Instead I took him to the crater in the City of London where the Irish Republican Army had blown up the streets.
We took a cab to Notting Hill and bought those yellow silk curtains.
Certain that no one would believe the story. Still very drunk. A pall over my forehead. We sat in Tim’s kitchen so I could, at a later date, prove that we had been there. I sat my god daughter on my lap. My jeans must have stunk of beer and cigarettes and sweat.
I think he was probably into fisting.
I can feel it. You are falling in love with me but I’m not interested. I can’t pretend. I can’t love you back. You may as well back away from the beloved. As you know, there’s a viper beneath the skin. Your weakness disgusts me. Those eyes looking up at me expecting so much more. Those big brown eyes offending me. I imagine pushing you down the stairs.
Lawyers, lovers, movers, electricians, renters, plumbers, real estate agents, judges, baristas.
Visitors: from England. My home town. I think you forget that my home town will always be there. Always. The softer landing. Regardless what you do to me. What you take from me. How you silence me. The months are passing quickly.
If you send me home. My mouth is wide open. A siren. From Whitstable.
Oh, Whitstable. I am coming home.
Leaving behind these savages. I would rather face my demons there.
Savages, blowing up there own people. Blaming the boys. The muslim boys. Demonizing islam.
It’s a drill… wait… no it’s not. There is a third bomb… wait no there isn’t. We’re looking for a dark skinned man… wait… actually two white ones. We need help identifying them… wait we’ve had one of them on a list for years and we know where he lives. Ok, we found them but we killed one… no wait his brother killed him… wait… no he didn’t. We captured the other one after a firefight but he shot himself… wait… he didn’t have a gun.
Savages, without opera. Savages, white and clean. Chained to their guns and their christianity. The lies they tell: the deficit. The heroes they claim. The heroes they abandon.
The gays are picking out their black shirts, their golden hair and musculature.
Being in jail radicalized me. Hanging with the Trans hookers. No longer gay. This queer, with other queers. Behind the women and men of colour, of indeterminate physicality. Liberty leading the people.
There is so much outraged. Outrage! A line has to be drawn. Robby, my darling ally. Now he is Dustin Lance Black‘s boyfriend, well… he had to be jettisoned. The trophy boyfriend.
I really loved him. Like a son.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/e7HJTCvzLXQ]
There he is with the gays (black and white) at the White House. Looking uncomfortable. His hair slicked back. His beautiful flaxen hair.
Meanwhile his ‘husband’ Lance Black, is a grand marshall/special guest star/nazi youth at San Francisco Pride. The same organisation that abandoned Bradley Manning last week. Turned their back on a world hero in favor of an illusionist.
Lance is a man who writes about history rather than participates in it.
A bunch of Iraq gay vets (murderers/terrorists) took it upon themselves to complain and the corporate Pride org buckled.
It was a sad day. A terrible, sad day.
One day films will be made about Bradley Manning and we will wonder, with a degree of homo incredulity, how Lance Black and the organizers of SanFrancisco Pride found themselves on the wrong side of history.
Hairless, blond Lance with his hairless, limp, blond husband.
So the argument rages. Is Bradley manning a hero? It seems that if he is… not many gay people agree. He broke the law they caw!
Well, did he? Whistle blowing (as it turns out) is an honorable, protected act.
Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7 pertaining to Classifications Prohibitions and Limitations clearly states that:
In no case shall information be classified… in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency… or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.
Thus, what Bradley Manning did when he disclosed cables that revealed extreme corruption and major breaches of diplomatic goodwill was, in fact, quite honorable, and he deserves protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act.
My friend Robby is part of a homosexual elite. Able to shape and destroy lives.
The bitter and resentful gays turning on their own. They daren’t turn on straight people. Why? They still want to be straight.
Meanwhile a black man comes out and the gay, white elite are thrilled. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends on Facebook.
Thank God! A black man, playing basket ball. He’s making it seem so comfortable.
Fuck HRC. Fuck GLAAD.
I am understanding now. Who those gays are. They never wanted to put up their hand and tell the world they were different. I did. They wanted to be teachers pet. I didn’t. They wanted to be perfect. Nope, not me.
Their only act of bravery is telling the world they are gay.
Astonishing. These absurd gay men screaming about how Bradley Manning broke the law. We who were born criminals… born gay, who every time we kissed or made love also broke the law. Would you have suggested abstinence until the laws magically changed? Did we deserve to go to jail for being gay, after all… we knew the consequences? Who do you think broke the law on your behalf to fight police and break windows at Stonewall? Sadly. it turns out, not many gay men. They were hiding in the back of the bar whilst the trannies broke the law. The gays are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst honorable men like Bradley Manning fight important battles against iniquity and injustice. By dissing Manning you merely collude with, support the illegal actions of the US military. Make your choice, but remember those of us who fought on your behalf once upon a time did so without regard for the law. Bradley Manning may or may not have broken laws. Without doubt, his actions helped liberate millions and hastened a US military withdrawal from Iraq. You must honor him.
Let’s face it. It wasn’t gay men fighting the police and breaking windows the day Judy died. The gays were hiding in the back of the bar or running away. Terrified of breaking the law. Terrified. They are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst others do their fighting for them.
One day, there will be men owning up to not wanting to be gay, staying in the closet because… they will say… ‘I’m not like that… look at what the gays have become…’
This week I purged myself of white, elite gay ‘friends’ on Facebook and I wished I knew… what I could do next.
For more about how we are evolving… read this: Steven W. Thrasher’s great piece in Gawker today.
Categories
Tempus Fugit
You must have worked out by now…gay men have tempestuous relationships.
It’s not unusual.
What they did, the feelings they had…they weren’t unusual.
Gay men get restraining orders. Beat each other up. Gay men resent…themselves.
He had lunch with a friend from NYC who knows your lover/husband/partner.
He said…what a warm character he is, that he’s friendly and brave. Courageous and resourceful…has a great future ahead of him.
Anyone who gets up in the morning and wears what he wears, well…he wants to be seen in a world where most people crave invisibility.
He saw the video. A big man with style.
As for you two? He thinks you’re silly for not wanting to forgive the stupidity, forget the battles.
You are, without doubt, indelibly linked.
You two beautiful men pressed together (as you intended) didn’t make him jealous. He felt like you had given him a clue.
He ignored the angry songs…
Seeing you with your new love gave him a clue as to what you might have been attracted to when you contacted him that dark winter.
You see, he could never understand what you saw in him. It was a mystery. He just felt like an old, fraudulent freak when you were together. Over dressed, too loud, too confident….lagging behind like an Indian wife.
Now he understands.
Now, wearing your own cool clothes for all to see…you look pretty damn good…he began to understand.
Do you understand? Understand what went down between you both a little better? Now you’ve been in the world as a gay man these past two years…or do you still feel like he took advantage of you?
I don’t know if you have any good memories of your time together. Are there any? All bound up with lies and recrimination and your coming out.
You both dropped a huge bomb on everybody around you. Nobody escaped unharmed. Both in denial. Both fragile. Both afraid.
Ever since you published your blog…well, he has been in awe. Impressed by your openness.
I’m sure that you don’t give him much thought nowadays. You must have heard what happened…there was so much fanfare about it all.
He had a long time in jail to think everything over.
A long time in terrible circumstances imagining that look of delight on your face…and he wouldn’t blame you. He would’ve been just as happy.
I don’t know if he/you will ever truly recover from what you went through.
There were many times when all he wished was that things between you hadn’t ended so badly so he could tell you what happened. Describe it in detail…because he knew you’d be fascinated.
He knows that for so much of your life you hid your creativity and your desire for beautiful things just in case this betrayed your true nature. He can’t imagine how that must have felt.
Seeing you emerge from that closet into the man you are today gives him great pleasure.
He wishes you all the best in your relationship and your life.
Categories
What A Dream I Have
Whenever I return home I am relieved.
Leaving the distractions and the doubt behind.
Cruel thoughts, many miles away.
Whitstable, it takes me a day or so to crawl back into my own skin. The scale of the town needs adjusting to. I feel like a giant towering over the small, clapboard houses. I cannot fit into the tiny shops.
The vitrine has not changed for many years.
The town has kept its original character.
Good and bad I know everyone on the street. Now I see people who I knew formerly in London. Gallery owners, actresses, commercial directors. They strut around thinking they own the place, which of course, they do.
“What are you doing here?” They say.
Last week I was dwarfed by skyscrapers in New York, today I am shrinking rapidly into my Whitstable self. No coyote to eat the dog, nobody to distract me from my task.
The children sit at their desks on tiny chairs in the same infant school where I learned about the autumn leaves, the saints and the sinners.
This morning we walked the grass paths on the freshly mown downs. In the thin sunshine the skin on my arms and hands looks brown and weathered. The fierce Californian sun, long forgotten.
Tomorrow we are driving to Dorset. Past Stonehenge, to the sea. Staying at The Bull Hotel in Bridport. Traveling the well maintained motorways.
I may just keep driving. I have everything I need.
Just head north through Bristol to Wales where I want to walk Offa’s Dyke. Find me a B&B in Clun. Eastward from the unspoiled Welsh counties to Shropshire. The Stiperstones, this earth is my grave.
Fried eggs and thick bacon, marmalade.
Northward again through the black country. Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland to the borders. I love you England. I love you.
I bought a pair of secondhand, brown velvet trousers and an ebony cane with an engraved, silver knob. I found a dark green cashmere and silk scarf, channeling Fanny and Stella in Burlington Arcade. It is cold enough to wear a beautiful hat, an autumn gown.
I am willing the winter moonlight.
I don’t want anyone else with me. This is mine.
I could not be further from the madness. England! Where my heart lies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIIK1jdMHUA&feature=colike
Categories
Family Death
There is no easy way to tell you this. No easy way to write these words.
Whitstable. September.
My brother Martin’s 35-year-old, long-term partner Juliet has died. A sweet-natured, complicated woman who wanted a baby very much, finally conceived two years ago.
She was a wonderful mother to my nephew Oscar. A really lovely child.
We heard the results today (13th Sept) of the autopsy. She died of acute kidney failure which lead to a heart attack.
Not one to complain she may have been in some discomfort for months but failed to tell anyone.
She lay dead on their kitchen floor for a very long time before my brother found her body. My infant nephew sat by her, maybe for 24 hours.
The neighbours heard him crying but did nothing.
My mother told me that the little boy had opened cupboards looking for something to eat. He found a pot of yogurt.
My brother broke down the door. He found her. Found them.
There are no suspicious circumstances.
Oscar has gone to live with my mother, his grandmother. My mother is a really great-grandmother.
The local newspaper report here.
Categories
Duncan Roy The ‘A’ List
Regardless of why I decided to get involved with Derek or The ‘A’ List I’m glad I did. Our pretend boyfriend scam…it was fun. Even though I have been portrayed as a smelly old man.
Pretending to be his boyfriend was absurd. A joke. I don’t know if that comes across on the show? That we were faking it?
Occasionally I throw myself back into being ‘gay’. I don’t have a very gay life on this mountain. Most queens are totally appalled that I live here, so isolated, away from the urban gay idyl.
Tom calls it my Shangri-La. Some men love it and for those I hold a special place in my heart. They get it. The dream of self-sufficiency, off the grid, chickens and home-grown vegetables.
When I pull off my country clothes (albeit RRL) and slide into something leaner I am dressed for the city. Whether it is WeHo or Chelsea, Soho or The Marais I am there to be seen, acknowledged and play that peculiar game of being ‘gay’.
I can live two distinct lives, maybe more?
In England my snooty friends called me a chameleon, meaning to insult me.
Surely being able to change ones color to blend in…is rather good? To adapt and change as the situation requires.
In England, my England I learned to speak with a different accent, merely to be heard.
I am a cock sucking homosexual but I wonder if others see it that way? What kind of gay am I?
Perhaps my lack of interest in sex makes me less gay, less human?
Remember when I was on Sex Rehab and admitted that the sex I had with men was traumatic? People wrote to me and told me that I wasn’t gay. “If Duncan Roy doesn’t want gay sex, he isn’t gay.”
They tried to throw me out of the gay club…for having an opinion.
Meeting the cast of the ‘A’ List was memorable because they have become, in their own way, icons. For good or for bad. I met most of them just once. At least three of them have admitted drug and alcohol problems.
I really liked Austin and his husband Jake who I could very easily imagine seeing here or in London. They are good people. I like Austin’s authenticity.
The worst of the bunch has to be…Derek. As you will see tonight (if you can be bothered) I enjoy ribbing him on camera. I used stock lines, old jokes that an overly sensitive American queen did not find very funny.
When the food arrives I say, “That looks like something that came out of your nose.” That’s funny isn’t it? I used it before and my friends laughed.
We hung out a few times but really, his lack of sophistication, curiosity and insight were wonders to behold. He seems so incomplete. Derek’s consumption of alcohol masking a sadness at his core…like so many untreated addicts. A problem that a huge number of gays share but have no intention of resolving.
Derek has no business to be anywhere but where he was born. Like so many gay men he has been forced into New York by small-town prejudice and an insatiable desire for cock.
A bland, mid-western bag of meat and bones.
He had no truck with history, our history, any history…he knew nothing of the city where he lives, of commerce, politics or God. Eking out an existence with appearances at provincial gay clubs and gay pride.
Derek lives every moment in the moment, no awareness of where he had come from and no interest in where he is going.
Did he read Eckhart Tolle? I’m kidding.
The power of now and only now and God forbid that you make me consider anything other than right now.
I am without context. I am without past or future.
Damn! This Queen needs a drink!
He is the antithesis of everything the other was.
I looked at Derek as one might a monkey in the zoo. The gay zoo. Trapped like a miserable, half naked gogo boy in his techno cage. Evidence of his genus. The sub species of gay to which we must all aspire.
Cocktails with orange slices perched on the rim.
Moisturized, combed, overly tanned. The shrill laughter and meaningless conversation hurt my ears.
I can’t imagine what the viewers of the ‘A’ List will make of me but…we’ll see. I am old. I am not Peter Pan. I have a beard. I live on a mountain. I have no sexual traction…time has eroded my usefulness to the gays.
It was an adventure into a life I have only the barest knowledge. A sociological exercise. Ripping open the wasp’s nest.
I hung out at bars and in clubs. I questioned who I was and the choices I have made.
When I was approached I politely declined. When they spilled their drinks on me I didn’t say a word.
Categories
Whitstable 1991
OK, so here are a few interesting clips from 1991.
Starring the various boys and friends who ended up in Whitstable at my house on Island Wall. Notably Jay Jopling, Nick Love and Damien Hirst.
There’s quite a bit of nudity and cock…so beware.
Bournemouth Film School…the house I shared with Lawrence and Charlie.
There’s some great stuff from Green Street, Orlando’s club in London.
Damien Hirst, Maia Norman, Orlando Campbell etc.
There’s the traveling, Sydney, Forbes NSW to stay with the Wilsons. And…more boys.
Kevin at City Gym in Sydney. The beautiful Dane I met in Florence and spent the summer. Whatever happened to him? I wanted to weep when I saw him again. He was beautiful.
The local Whitstable boys. Luke, beautiful Luke.
If any of them ever loved me I was blissfully unaware.
And…there’s a lot of…hair. During most of this…I am drunk or fucked up, remember that. I wouldn’t get sober for another 6 years.
There’s a lot of dancing and dressing up. I seem to be lip synching to Judy…missing some man. Again.
What a destructive theme.